I left town 15 years ago and put all of my shit into storage. Now I'm back and trying to go through it all. And I keep asking myself, "Why did I save so much shit?"
Cutest find ever! This little red-velvet jumper dress was my “fancy” winter outfit when I was maybe six or seven years old, usually paired with a white turtleneck and white tights. (WERK!) My mother had it made by a seamstress named Ingeborg Kuppinger of 22 E 65th Street – her label is sewn in under the neckline.
Of course, this is one of those things from storage that I can’t actually use but also seems way too sentimental (and irreplaceable) to toss. But if I have to put it away in a box and schlep it around every time I move, what’s the point of having it?
I know! I'll get one of the American Girl dolls and dress her up as my own little Mini Me. Problem solved.
For my 3rd…uh, 4th birthday we went to the Magic Towne House, a long-defunct magic venue at 60th and Third. (At my birthday party this year I made espresso martinis and offered a DIY Bloody Mary bar, so definitely a step up from cake and ice cream.) Guests included my aunt and four other kids, one of whom is a big-shot venture capitalist now. If my parents knew they’d probably wish they’d married me off to him in childhood.
What I didn’t know until I found this book was that this was where I got one of my favourite childhood toys – a reversible Little Red Riding Hood doll. It was three characters in one: if you pulled Little Red’s dress the other way she turned into Grandma, and if you reversed Grandma’s hood she turned into the Wolf, like so:
I loved playing with this doll. I’d run the whole story through, acting out all of the characters, then reset the costumes and go through it again and again. That may very well have inspired my love of theatre, the idea that someone could play multiple roles with just a change of costume. And considering the frequent transitions I’ve both been subjected to and sought out in my life, an early fascination with change is pretty telling.
For example, just in terms of residences, over the years I’ve moved between five cities/towns in four countries on three different continents. (And that’s without having military/diplomat parents.) Just in NYC (my hometown) I’ve lived in 12 different apartments (or 16 if you count four different dorms in college), and thanks to my parents’ divorce, eight of those were before I had even turned 18. Add on another 12 apartments or houses outside of NYC in the last 15 years. I went to five different schools from pre-K through 12th grade, three different summer camps, then three undergraduate colleges (including a transfer and study abroad) and eventually two different graduate schools. I’ve basically spent my life being The New Kid.
My interests have changed as often as my address. The elective courses I took in high school and uni were all over the map, from history to physics to language to world literature to film to sociology to critical theory to creative writing to cultural studies to computer programming to bowling (true!) to tap dancing. I was in a half-dozen different school groups: sports, theatre, chorus, student magazines, debate, etc. Over my life I’ve played on teams in five different sports, taken lessons in a half-dozen instruments, and studied four different languages. Am I an absolute expert at all of those? Of course not. My skills in all of those range from advanced to proficient to barely novice. But I still enjoyed doing them all, and isn’t that what’s important?
Does this drive for constant reinvention stem from my unstable and chaotic childhood? Is it because I of my ADD (diagnosed at age eight)? Do I just get bored easily? It’s probably a bit of all three; I just know that I find too many varied things interesting to have the capacity to devote myself wholeheartedly to one and only one subject. (Which is how I realized that I could never pursue an academic career.) This year I’m diving into the worlds of radio production and musical improvisation. Add another two ticks to my scorecard.
But chopping and changing between all those different scenes hasn’t really altered who I am – I just swing between things that appeal to different parts of my personality. My computer friends considered me a jock; my hockey friends saw me as a geek; my theatre friends thought I was a computer nerd; my derby friends thought I was a grammar wonk, etc. But none of them were wrong – I’m all those things. Though just like my Little Red Riding Hood doll, people often only see one facet of me at a time.
Sure, some might think me a dilettante. I think I’ll go with “Renaissance Woman” instead.
You’ve probably noticed by now that in this book “baby” is always referred to by the male pronoun. Ah, gender roles of the 1970s! And of course the book is predicated on the idea that parenting is mainly “mothering”, with “Daddy” getting just a couple of mentions here and there. (Although of course it’s nice to see that my dad was great with his darling.)
My last boyfriend in Australia was a stay-at-home parent for his son for the boy’s first five years, while his girlfriend (who had more earning power thanks to her degree) was the one who worked full-time to support them all. You can bet your ass he changed diapers and bathed his baby – not to mention fed him, burped him, clothed him, helped him learn and did all of the other non-stop activities involved in taking care of an infant.
This was as late as the 2000s and he still got all kinds of micro-aggressive crap from people: “Oh, are you on babysitting duty today?” (No, he’s not babysitting, he’s parenting.) “What a cute baby! Giving Mummy a day off are we?” (No, it’s actually Daddy who’s the primary caregiver.) Et cetera. Not to mention the problem he regularly faced of needing to change diapers while out of the house and not being able to find a changing table he could access – they were always only in the women’s bathrooms. (Thankfully these days more places are starting to have separate “parenting rooms”.)
My ex-bf was (and still is) a terrific father – not just in his dedication to taking care of his son, but in his parenting philosophy of how to raise a smart, independently thinking and moral human being. As someone who’s always known she would not make a particularly great parent, this was one of the things I really respected him for when we met. I became essentially a stepmum when he and I moved in together, and trying to take care of an 8-year-old – even only every other week, thanks to shared custody – was a real challenge for me. So big props to all of you out there raising children. Even from my limited experience with it, I know how difficult it can be.
My mother always likes to tell me (and anyone else who will listen) how advanced I was as a baby. I guess she was right – look at me, crudely picking up objects and putting them to my mouth a whole two months ahead of schedule! (“Quick, dear – call Harvard!”)
The more things change the more they really do stay the same. These days I do a lot of sitting alone indefinitely (if in a favorable position) most of the time. And I definitely size everyone up before I go to them – though I always thought that was more from being raised in NYC.
But apparently I had a bit of trouble with waving bye-bye. I guess I still do. Even after all the places I’ve lived and the loved ones I’ve lost and all the good friends I’ve had to move on from, it still doesn’t get any easier.
Wow. I didn’t realize until I read this again more closely that I was breastfed for only a paltry 3½ weeks. (Current medical guidelines recommend at least six months.) No wonder I ended up with allergies and asthma. Jeez, thanks for nothin’, mom.
Isn’t it amazing how early our personalities get formed? I still don’t like to go to sleep, I’m somewhat colicky, I eat eagerly and I still prefer a good bottle.
Apparently I was quite a vandal artist as a child. I do remember scribbling all over the blank pages of my mother’s address book, but one of my mother’s favorite stories – which I don’t remember myself – is about how I took a ballpoint pen and draw all over seven of her eight leather-upholstered dining chairs. Why I left the last one blank is a mystery. (Maybe I left it for Elijah?)
The book was supposed to cover my First Seven Years, but in typical fashion for my family (heeeeyyyy ADHD), my mother hardly even filled out most of the entries for the first 12 months.
Case in point: what was the news on the day I arrived? I know who was president at the time and what the #1 song was, and I've seen pictures of the (godawful) fashions of the day. But it seems that the Best Car on the Road on the day of my birth shall be lost to the mists of time.
I started skating at Sky Rink when I was about six or seven years old, a tomboy dressed uncomfortably in thick tights and a skirted leotard, being forced to twirl and spin with a feminine grace she didn’t possess. I had been a total washout at the dance and gymnastics classes my mother enlisted me in, so figure skating was next on her list. I actually loved being on skates, but hated how it was basically dancing on ice. If I had known there were any other options besides figure skating I might have been able to transfer my skills, but this was the 1970s and little girls in New York City simply didn’t play hockey. (Or at least, my mother didn’t think so.)
It was called Sky Rink because the rink was located on the 16th floor of a midtown ziggurat located in the trainyards wasteland at 33rd Street and 10th Avenue. Yes, it was actually once a rink in the sky; now it’s only a rink on a pier.
Although I quit figure skating within the year, I took any chance I could to go skating at birthday parties, because I still loved being on skates (even though I’d have to pull myself around the wall for the first few minutes until I got used to them again). Years later, in my last year of high school, my then boyfriend took me to my first-ever hockey game, to see the Rangers play at MSG. (No one in my family followed professional spectator sports, and we certainly didn’t go to any games.)
I stared down at the players zipping across the ice at full speed, running into each other, falling, sliding, and getting right up again, and thought, “Fuck figure skating. I want to do that.” I asked for a pair of hockey skates for my birthday and started going to hockey skating classes at Sky Rink, to learn how to use these black, ungainly, toepick-free skates that I’d only ever seen boys wear. I was the only girl in the class.
Soon I gathered together the gear – there was a lot of gear – and joined my college’s club hockey team. Which was a men’s team. In a checking league. But since it wasn’t a varsity team, they couldn’t actually keep women off of it, as long as we were students and paid the club dues. There was one other girl there too, a Canadian student who played goaltender. They put me at right wing – as a rank beginner I obviously wasn’t good enough to play center or the very important role of defense (my favored position once I got better over the years). I got my ass kicked, physically, on the ice – a lot – and probably more than few low-grade concussions. But I was determined to keep playing.
In my 20s I basically lived and breathed hockey. I went to hockey camp in Canada a couple of times; I studied up on strategies and positioning – knowing I could never beat the bigger guys on strength or speed, I went for having game smarts instead; and I practiced or played two to three times every week, including adult rec hockey at Sky Rink (still in its ‘sky’ location). The kids always got the earlier spots, so we’d come out of our games around 10 or 11 pm and walk up 10th Avenue to get a cab on 34th St. (This was also right near the Lincoln Tunnel entrance/exit ramp, and we’d see sex workers standing on the street corner, trying to get some business. They’d always be dressed in something impossibly skimpy, even in winter, and I always felt bad for them, tottering around in heels and lingerie and a small jacket in the cold.)
Sky Rink eventually moved to Chelsea Piers, opening a new facility with two rinks. Wanting to maximize my time on skates, I got a part-time job as a ‘rink rat’, who skate around during general sessions and make sure people aren’t horsing around or holding hands four abreast or skating in the wrong direction, etc. The jacket above was my uniform (also in an XL, just like the body-hiding T-shirts I used to wear). My first session some kid went down face-first; I helped him off and to the medical room to tend to his bloody nose and got spatters of blood down the front of the jacket (luckily they came out in the wash).
On the collar is a pin from the Brooklyn Blades, the first women’s team that I ever played on. That’s when playing opportunities really opened up for me, mainly because I was no longer completely outclassed size-wise and because women will actually pass the puck to other women (whereas most men pretty much never pass the puck to us). I continued to play hockey for the next 11 years – even becoming a referee and an assistant coach for a kids’ team – until I moved to Australia and put all of my gear in storage.
Even though I could get back into adult rec hockey again – I went to an adult clinic in Prospect Park for a few weeks in January, to give it a shot – I just don’t have the same passion for it that I used to have. Some of it is probably due to not wanting to schlep all that gear around, but I think definitely a big part of it is that I’m less interested in having to fight for space in an overwhelmingly male sport after being involved with roller derby for the past several years – a world where I’m not categorized as “female” (i.e. lesser), but just as a skater, considered just on athletic merits and not my gender; a world where I could be fully involved and have an actual say in shaping my league and the sport. Once you’ve been involved in running the show, you don’t really want to go back to being someone relegated to the sidelines, someone who never gets the puck passed to them.
But I do remember a time when I honestly, earnestly thought I’d never, ever tire of, or want to stop playing hockey. Funny how that feels like a lifetime ago now.
T-shirts! How would we ever remember that we had ever gone anywhere, known anyone or experienced anything without a commemorative T-shirt? I found a huge pile of them packed away in one of my boxes: one from a company bowling team, two from hockey teams I played on, eight from my undergrad school and another two from my summer camp.
Unfortunately they all now smell pretty musty from mold spores; I washed them twice in hot water with white vinegar, as the internet told me to, but I still can’t quite get the smell out, so I guess I’ll have to toss them. I don’t really care about the university shirts anymore (and certainly not the bowling team one), but the camp shirts would have been nice to hang on to for PJs. Maybe I’ll give that another go in the wash. (Pro tip: if you’re going to pack away clothing for a long time, make sure to put it in something airtight.)
There’s another notable thing about these shirts – they’re all a full three sizes larger than I actually wear. Guess who has two thumbs and hated her body in her 20s?
When I read this book in 1995, I was really taken by its core concept of “atoms vs. bits”. I had no idea at the time how much it would come to define my life as I spent several years moving back and forth between four major cities on three different continents.
“Atoms” represents anything analog, physical, that takes up space and weight – you know, something like boxes of books, CDs and DVDs stored away in a musty storage closet for 15 years.
“Bits”, of course, is anything digitized, 1s and 0s, lacking in solid form and taking up no room other than the hard drive they’re stored on. And now we have hard drives that can hold a terabyte’s worth of information but still be no heavier than a small paperback book.
In my 20s, like a lot of people I prided myself on my wall of books, CDs and DVDs, a testament to my geek cred and good taste; a library of entertainment sitting there at my fingertips for anytime I wanted to dip into it. Except I realized that I almost never rewatched or reread any of these things. All they did was take up room, need dusting, and need carting around as I moved from one apartment to the other. At the time there were no streaming services, so physical media was all we had – and if you didn’t have and wanted to watch/listen to/read it, you had to either buy it, rent it or borrow it from somewhere.
My boyfriend at the time was the one who was more into CDs and DVDs, but I had shelves and shelves (and even some boxes in my dad’s storage space) full of books that I had read years ago and never picked up again. I blame my childhood fantasy of being the neighborhood librarian, living in a big house packed to the rafters with books of every kid, with everyone coming to me for recommendations. “Aha, I know just the book you want!” I’d exclaim, and lead them through a veritable maze to the exact spot of the title I wanted to give them. (Yeah, I hadn’t heard of the Collyer Brothers back then.) I never wanted to get rid of any books at all – they were my treasures, my achievements, my external brain. When I was little I thought if only I could read every book ever published I would possess all of the knowledge of humankind. (Didn’t really consider how I’d go about learning dozens of other languages to an advanced reading level so I could read books outside of English, but you know, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.)
Of course as a little kid I didn’t have to deal with moving those books from place to place. They became a bit of a pain as I moved to a new dorm every year in college, and then I lived in a couple of apartments after college, so that was a few more moves. But as I started moving further and further afield – to Chicago, to Prague, to Melbourne – I realized I had to start shedding more and more of my possessions. What was the point of hanging on to all these books that I had read once and had no interest in reading again? With so much reference material now online, where it could be updated regularly and searched through easily, why bother with all those big, soon-to-be-out-of-date reference books? It’s one thing to pack everything up into boxes and chuck ‘em in a U-Haul to move across town; try getting down to “whatever I can fit in two suitcases” as your packing limit and you find you really start redefining your relationship to physical objects.
So I got rid of as much as I could. Heaps and heaps of stuff. I lugged boxes and boxes of books over to the Strand to get a few bucks for them, and anything else went to Goodwill. I went through my clothes and got rid of stuff I’d bought years ago and still wasn’t wearing. I took my most favorite DVDs and put them in a disc binder that I could travel more easily with – and you know what, I hardly ever rewatched any of them even then. Why bother when I can go through the universe of digital bits and find all sorts of new things to watch whenever I want?
But it’s hard to get rid of things you once valued. I’m finding boxes full of my books from grad school in Chicago. Why did I pack them away? I must have thought I’d use them again – or maybe that having them lined up on my bookshelf would demonstrate to visitors how amazingly smart and cool I was – and yet seeing them again now has made me think only, “I have no interest you anymore. Why did I bother spending all that money to keep you locked away in the dark?”
I’ve come a long way, though. I’ve gotten much better at not buying things, of asking people not to buy me things – I’d rather have experiences. This storage space full of crap that I’m currently trying to empty out represents only a fraction of the possessions – physical, heavy, atoms-based stuff – that I used to own.
Or, perhaps I should say, the stuff that used to own me.
The first adult novel I ever read was John Irving’s The World According to Garp. I was 12 years old. I remember finding it on the bookshelf in the living room: it had the tie-in movie cover, with a posterized photo of Robin Williams, whom I recognized from Mork & Mindy (which I loved as kid). I cracked it open to see what it was about. The first chapter of the book drew me in – Jenny Fields is a military nurse during WWII; in a vet hospital she tends to a brain-damaged and dying young soldier, Technical Sergeant Garp. She’s kind and caring, but also sensible, independent and strong-willed; she wants to have a baby without the bother of having to find a husband first, so she inseminates herself via T.S. Garp, gently bringing him to an erection and then climbing atop him in his hospital bed. (If an adult had known what I was reading they would have definitely confiscated it.) That first chapter was interesting enough to start, but I had no idea how blown away I would be by what was to come.
If you’ve never read Garp, you should know that it’s filled with sex, death, love, violence, metafiction, wrestling, rape, mutilation, feminism, adultery, vengeance, fellatio, Vienna, gender politics, broken relationships, transsexuality, lesbianism and bears. It would set my standard for novels for years to come.
The works of John Irving continued to influence my life for the next almost two decades as I read more and more of his books, every one that I could get my hands on. As a teenager, I used Print Shop on my boxy little Mac to make up small posters of my favorite quotes from The Hotel New Hampshire and tape them to my bedroom wall, though I opted not to display (since my mother would see) what I thought was one of his cleverest lines, a main character’s arch observation that “it is improper to describe making love to one’s sister.” (Describing incest is the improper part, you see.) Years later, I cried reading A Widow for One Year and for a few years wore nothing but jeans with all-black T-shirts (no slogans!) in homage to its protagonist. When I got to grad school and had to pick a topic for my master’s thesis, there was no question in my mind that it would be on Garp. It took me weeks of dithering and consulting with my academic advisor to figure out what exactly my topic would be (which is how I guessed I really wasn’t cut out for an academic career), but even then I was still sufficiently haunted by this book – in a way, my first (real) book – to know that I couldn’t write about anything else.
As the years have gone by and my reading habits have become more digital – and less attentive – I’ve picked up fewer long, “womb-to-tomb” novels like Irving’s than I used to. Of course I’ve also moved on to reading many other authors and styles, but sadly I simply don’t have the reading time I used to as a kid. (Who does?) I confess that I haven’t even read his last few books, ’cause they’re just so big. Nonetheless John Irving’s books were my first windows onto the messy, complicated and bittersweet world of adult life. They’ve stayed with me since childhood and will probably continue to do so for years to come.
There’s no conclusion I can write that can beat the last line of The World According to Garp – one of my favorites in all of modern literature – so I’ll just leave you with that instead:
In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.
